Site Mobile Navigation

San Fransiscans Tire of the Life of the Party

No one denies Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr.'s ability to stir an audience. The other day he spoke at the 20th-anniversary commemoration of the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, and his simple words on this ''tragedy of tragedies'' brought louder applause than the star attraction, Joan Baez.

Mr. Brown knows how to make people laugh, too. Always impeccably dressed in one of his classic $3,000 Brioni suits, he wisecracks, makes goofy faces and generally hams it up at every festival, groundbreaking and public announcement, instilling in spectators the disarming effect of watching the coolest kid in class become the class clown. In fact, voters in a recent poll said his charisma was his greatest asset.

But after three years, those voters seem tired of a Mayor most notable for talking a crowd into his vest pocket. For all his charm, Mr. Brown, a Democrat who is one of only two or three mayors in the country with widespread name recognition, is in trouble. The man whose political clout and social savvy single-handedly put San Francisco back on the national political map is getting his worst approval ratings ever. Only 3 of every 10 voters surveyed in a recent poll by The San Francisco Chronicle said they were inclined to back him for a second term. That amounts to a radical decline for a Mayor who breezed into office with the support of two-thirds of the electorate.

And for a master politician with 34 years in public office -- 15 of them as Assembly Speaker, holder of the second-most-important elective office in the nation's most populous state -- the low approval ratings are especially perplexing now. This, after all, is an ideal time to be a mayor, when mayors all over the country are riding high, taking and getting credit for national trends like falling crime rates, low unemployment and sound fiscal health. And Mr. Brown's San Francisco fits all those patterns: crime and unemployment are down, and the city's budget, which showed a $65 million deficit when he took office, now has a projected surplus of $145 million.

Still, San Franciscans are obviously upset. They are upset, the poll found, with Mr. Brown's seeming inability to make the buses and trains run on time or to get the homeless off the streets. And they are upset at downtown traffic jams, a lack of public parking, litter, mediocre schools and the Mayor's ''arrogance.'' In short, they are upset at a lot of things.

For Mr. Brown, who left the Assembly (where he nicknamed himself the Ayatollah) only after term limits had forced him out, the nearly unthinkable is happening: the looming possibility of life as a civilian. Politicians presumed dead, like Mr. Brown's predecessor, Frank Jordan, are resurrecting themselves, talking of a possible challenge in 1999.

After a first year in which he all but walked on water, there was really nowhere for Mr. Brown to go but down. But just why he is so far down depends on whom you ask.

The Mayor's press secretary, Kandace Bender, says the latest poll was worded so that the responses specifically regarding him would be negative. ''I think the important figure to remember is that 56 percent of the voters approve of the direction the city is going,'' she said. ''Three years ago that figure was 35 percent.''

But others are inclined to say that the very qualities that enthralled voters in the first place, Mr. Brown's glamour and glitz, have begun to grate on a city where homelessness is so prevalent and two-thirds of the residents are renters who may never be able to afford to buy in San Francisco's exorbitant housing market. (Some people are still smarting over the lavish parties, closed to the public, that the Mayor gave when the city was host to the United States Conference of Mayors last year.)

Then there are those who are disenchanted with the machine-style politics Mr. Brown brought with him from the Assembly, where back-room wheeling and dealing was the norm.

''One thing we've realized since Brown is that the Supervisors are irrelevant,'' said Ted Gullicksen, manager of the San Francisco Tenants Union, which won a ballot measure in the election on Nov. 3 that helped protect tenants from evictions. Mr. Brown had endorsed the ballot measure and asked the Board of Supervisors to resurrect 1996 legislation that would further strengthen tenants' protections, but Mr. Gullicksen said the Mayor had simply been trying to bolster his position for his coming election.

''Brown made his reputation as someone who plays hardball politics,'' Mr. Gullicksen said. ''His No. 1 goal is keeping himself in office, rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. If there was another progressive candidate on the horizon, we would endorse them over Brown.''

Of course, it is never easy being mayor of San Francisco. Each of Mr. Brown's immediate two predecessors survived only one term. The people of this city are so politically active that the free weeklies run listings of coming protests. It is probably safe to say that if Mr. Brown had declared war on the kind of quality-of-life irritations to which Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani devoted so much energy in New York, the squeegee men, the strip clubs and the panhandlers would not have gone quietly. Indeed, not long after he had announced aggressive moves to clear encampments put up by the homeless, protesters bombarded Mr. Brown with three pies in the face.

''This is probably the most politically active city in the country,'' said Phillip Matier, a political columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. ''It's a very expensive place to live, and people want to believe they're getting their money's worth. You also have all these competing interests all the time. It's not an accident that so many of the state's high offices are occupied by San Franciscans: this city is very tough on politicians, and only the strongest survive.''

If so, then the Mayor should manage to weather the political doldrums. Willie Lewis Brown Jr., born dirt-poor in segregated Mineola, Tex., in 1934, was Slick Willie long before anyone had even heard of Bill Clinton. He has, for example, managed to duck many accusations over the years that he rewards political friends with important contracts and development deals.

Those charges of patronage and cronyism have followed him back to San Francisco: just recently a mayoral committee looking over proposals for the redevelopment of a former naval base marina called Treasure Island recommended that the deal go to a group of investors with close political ties to the Mayor, in an arrangement that critics say would net the city far less money than other proposals.

The Mayor shrugs off the accusations of cronyism, saying that after 34 years in government, there are few people he does not know.

Anticipating criticism over the homeless and the city's bus and rail system, called Muni, Mr. Brown devoted over half of his state-of-the-city speech last month to those two issues, explaining what he had tried to do and what he would do in the coming year. Ms. Bender, his press secretary, said the voters' view of how he handles Muni would change when they became aware of what he was doing to improve it.

''We've ordered about 280 new buses, 250 new electric trolleys and 136 light rail vehicles,'' she said. ''We've slotted $23 million over last year's base-line budget for Muni. We've cleared all of the backlog of customer complaints.''

In addition, she said, the Mayor has reduced crime in the system, ordered that tracks on the rail line be replaced and shortened commuting time by assigning traffic officers to make sure buses can pass through intersections.

''Given all that,'' she said, ''if you ask voters, 'Do you approve or disapprove of what the Mayor has done with Muni,' what do you think the answer will be?''

Ms. Bender said the Mayor was also working on homelessness, although the city strongly disputes figures, from advocates for the homeless, showing 16,000 people on the streets. ''Our figures are between 4,000 and 6,000,'' Ms. Bender said.

For his part, the Mayor denies that he is worried about his poll numbers. His position, political observers say, is strengthened by the fact that no one on the progressive end of the city's political spectrum -- which runs from the moderately liberal Democratic to the very liberal -- has stepped forward to run against him.

''In order for someone to be very threatened, they have to face challenges from the left and right,'' said Mr. Matier, the Chronicle columnist. ''That hasn't happened here.''

By Mr. Brown's account, the reason is that he is one of a kind. ''There's never been a mayor who opens up City Hall on Saturdays and gives everyone 10 minutes,'' he said at a recent press briefing, adding that his phone number was still listed.

''It's going to be hard for anybody who suddenly decides he's going to take Willie Brown out,'' he said. ''I really work at this job. Every day of my life I work at this job. No one is going to be as prepared as I am.''